Writing adaptations. How to take an existing story and give it a new life, shape and audience.

Adaptation isn't about transferring a story from one form to another. It's about discovering what the story needs to become in its new medium. Publishers and producers LOVE to option adaptations.

In this workshop, we’ll explore the creative possibilities of adaptation: what to preserve, what to lose, what to reinvent, and how a change of form can reveal something that wasn't visible in the original.

Drawing on professional experience across screenwriting, theatre and fiction, we'll examine the particular demands of adapting prose for performance including character, point of view, dialogue, interiority, structure, scale and visual storytelling. We’ll consider why some apparently essential elements of a novel may need to disappear, while a tiny detail can become the key to an entire adaptation.

The workshop will also connect with my own Newlyn residency, during which I am writing a new play inspired by the Newlyn School of Artists, offering a live example of the process of taking historical material, research and existing narratives and transforming them into a new piece of theatre.

Participants will work with a story of their own choosing and begin the process of imagining it in another form.

You’ll leave with an adaptation blueprint: a clear plan for what stays, what changes, what gets discovered, and what your new version of the story might become.

The workshop is 2 hours long, but there will be an (optional) half an hour extra at the end to ask any questions, or get advice about any individual projects you're working on. Please be aware that places are limited, so we recommend that you don't delay booking your place.

Description supplied by the event organiser.